Thought Leadership

In the world of customer experience (CX), your efforts can successfully differentiate you from your peers, but in order to achieve this, you need to focus on more than simply listening to customers and acting on that data.  A successful CX program requires continuous evolution and advancement to adapt to a company’s ever-changing landscape. When working with brands to optimize their CX programs we refer to this program evolution as CX Maturity.

Every CX program is different.  Each company has a unique set of internal and external circumstances that require a customized action plan.  In order to create the right CX strategy, it is important to understand where you are and where you want to take your program.  From there, any program can take the right steps toward success.

In order to figure out where your program stands in terms of CX strategy, alignment, and engagement, there are four major areas you need to consider for CX Maturity:

Cultural

The cultural aspect of CX Maturity refers to how well your organization is aligned with your CX vision, program, and its goals. An advanced program is well socialized and employees are familiar with the program.  They are invested, as the culture of the organization is customer-centric and puts the customer at the center of all decisions. There is also a well-established cross functional team, CX strategy, and employee engagement program.

Technological

A CX program that is technologically mature will have an advanced customer listening program that includes collecting, analyzing, and reporting capabilities.  This technology allows companies to transform the way they interact with customers, to start intelligent conversations, and to utilize direct, indirect, and inferred feedback.  It will incorporate AI, advanced data science, and cutting-edge features that transform simple metrics into meaning.

Analytical

Mature analytical programs incorporate customer and employee experience data as well as operational, CRM, segmentation, and other data sources to uncover real intelligence that impacts the business. Leveraging these data sources creates a holistic view of the company and enables you to get insights that siloed data cannot provide.  These programs also leverage Voice of Employee data to understand internal employee’s perspective on the customer experience. Mature programs are able to get to the bottom of customer issues, discover root cause, and act on customer intelligence.

Business Value

Last, but possibly most important, is the question of whether or not your program provides you with real business value. CustomerThink recently showed that less than one-third of CX professionals are seeing tangible results from their CX program.  A program that has reached full CX maturity will have a drawn out ROI framework, complete with a detailed plan for measuring success. CX metrics are tied to overall business objectives and the CX team is able to show ties to business outcomes. The value of the program is well known throughout the company.

When you are able to assess each of these individual areas of your organization, you can piece together a clear picture of the maturity of your CX program. After your assessment, you can then set goals, create a plan, and get on your way to evolving your CX program.

In my last post, I discussed the expanding role of the CMO from steward of the brand to caretaker of the end-to-end customer relationship. While this transition has been recognized by various studies, it has been especially evident in my own experience as Chief Marketing Officer at InMoment. In fact, my position gives me an even more interesting and unique perspective: I have a front row seat to new developments in the marketing world and to the evolution of the customer experience (CX) industry.

Today’s marketers are increasingly seeing customer experience fall under their umbrella of duties, and it’s easy to confuse CX efforts with traditional marketing approaches such as loyalty marketing programs. However, marketers should be warned that this is a place where “similar” definitely does not mean “equal.”

Loyalty marketing programs refer to a company-wide initiative that is focused on growing and retaining existing customers by selling them more. CX programs help businesses understand the customer/brand relationship and what makes the customer loyal to the brand in the first place. The key difference between the two is in their approach: loyalty marketing is selling—often through incentives—while customer experience focuses on the ongoing conversation with the customer to then drive a deeper sense of loyalty.

This is where a traditional approach to loyalty programs goes wrong: At the end of the day, your customers don’t want to be bought with coupons, infrequent freebies, and discounts. While they appreciate them, they aren’t what makes them loyal. Customers want to feel valued and heard. If you look through the lens of customer experience, you can reset your loyalty marketing programs to take a more holistic, relationship-centric approach that will truly impress your customers.

Here are three specific ways a CX mindset can help you take your loyalty program to the next level:

Craft a Consistent Experience

Each year, InMoment surveys both brands and customers to unearth the latest trends in customer experience. The 2018 CX Trends Report revealed that consumers across all industries are creeped out by the way companies use their personal data and are therefore more reluctant to share that data. This can be a massive problem for loyalty marketing programs as they require customers to enroll by sharing some form of personal data. So how can a CX mindset help you solve this possible customer objection? One word: consistency.

Customers need to know that they can trust your brand from the get-go. If they’re receiving mixed messages in policy, employee interaction, or overall experience, they aren’t going to know what to expect and will be less likely to trust you with their information. If you approach this problem with a CX mindset, you know that you need to dedicate resources to unearth areas of brand inconsistency so you can streamline, hire, and train appropriately and put the best foot forward before asking for customer data.

If customers have a great impression of who you are as a brand, their positive and consistent experiences will inspire the trust they need to join your loyalty program.

Provide the Right Perks

Though perks alone won’t drive true brand loyalty, they are incredibly necessary to provide what customers expect when they sign up. However, your efforts can be all for nought if you aren’t providing the right incentives.

According to that same CX Trends report, customers are less likely to share their info when a program simply offers to make interactions easier, more efficient, or to deliver personalized recommendations. What they do value is when they receive exclusive access to sales, events, or products. Essentially, today’s customers are more willing share their data if they are given the VIP treatment.

The listening capabilities of a CX platform can help you to further narrow down what perks really drive participation in your loyalty programs.

Focus on Relationships, Not Memberships

Sure, customer satisfaction is a short-term win. After all, if a customer was able to purchase the product or service they were looking for, they might be more willing to become a loyalty program member. But why stop there? When you provide excellent brand interactions over and over again, you have a customer that will come back, buy more, and recommend you to others. That is the kind of customer you create when you focus on relationships and loyalty over merely satisfaction.

The key to going beyond “good” and creating excellent experiences is emotion. When InMoment studied unstructured customer data, we found that when discussing memorable experiences, most customers concentrated on the interactions they had with brand representatives and, even more importantly, the emotions they evoked. Ultimately, it’s not the 20% off coupons that inspire emotional experiences, it’s the meaningful human interactions that keep customers around in the long run.

With customer experience, you can go beyond collecting loyalty members and utilize emotion  to create lasting impact.

Though loyalty marketing programs and customer experience both have similar goals, it is vital that marketers recognize customer experience goes beyond the membership/incentive mindset. When you focus on customer experience, you can enrich all areas of your business—including your loyalty program—by understanding your customers, evoking positive emotions, and fostering long-lasting relationships.

To learn more about what customers expect from their brand interactions, check out the 2018 CX Trends Report: What Brands Should Know About Creating Memorable Experiences!

With a rise in social media communications, the goal posts of customer engagement have forever shifted, demanding a more instant and personal approach from brands. Traversing each channel of communication can be a minefield, with each one requiring its own style and speed of response. At the same time, customers are becoming increasingly savvy to alternate ways to reach a brand and this has changed the expectations of customer experience. In this piece, InMoment investigates the current state of play for brands in the multichannel communication sphere and explores how they can find the balance in their own CX approaches.

Whether it be responding to a customer complaint or a more general enquiry, the multichannel approach is bringing the consumer into ever closer contact with a business. As a result, brands need to evolve their CX approach to ensure they can continue to meet the expectations of customers who demand a 24/7 response – those businesses that do this will thrive. This means a CX programme needs to take into consideration bricks and mortar retailing, online operations, mobile interfaces, social platforms and beyond.
While each channel is distinct they should not be looked at as siloed avenues – with the technology now available, brands can build an open response model, allowing them to successfully bring their CX strategy into alignment with the multiple channels available for communication.

What is key for businesses is to invest in technology that enhances the customer experience. InMoment’s latest CX Trends Survey, launched in April this year, found that brands often overinvest in technology for the sake of it rather than looking at what will impact the relationship with the consumer. The survey found that the most valuable experiences that involve technology reflect a desire for convenience: self-checkout at a physical store and the ability to give feedback via a mobile device. The fact that customers are so eager to share feedback is golden for brands, since it gives them opportunities to listen and act.

If brands are implementing new technology, they must ensure that it provides value to the customer experience across all channels. One example of a brand using cutting-edge tech to do just that is IKEA. Using augmented reality, they provide customers with a high-tech solution to very practical challenges: virtually seeing what a specific paint colour will look like in context, and seeing how a piece of furniture will fit into a room — both in terms of size and aesthetics. The key to investing in flashy new technology is to ensure they align with your overall brand strategy and follow through to ensure they make a real impact on customers.

Businesses should also see the 24/7 consumer as an opportunity to create new found levels of engagement with their target audience. Brands need to embrace the multichannel approach and renovate any outdated CX models that don’t encompass the nuances of each platform. In the last few months we’ve seen dozens of retailers and hospitality businesses significantly downsize or collapse, such as Toys R Us, Maplin and Prezzo. We’ve seen the ease of purchasing via online retailers and price-competitive grocers being blamed, along with falling behind with vital store updates, however, what many brands are missing is the importance of nailing the customer experience, in a relevant way for all customers across every brand touchpoint.

There are clear pressures for brands, such as increasing operational costs and squeezed budgets, but this is where understanding what is important to customers is paramount. Businesses that create memorable, positive impressions are the ones that will prosper – those that deliver what they promise, consistently across all platforms, and really listen to their customers. Staff interaction cannot be overlooked as it has a huge impact – both good and bad – on the customer experience. Consumers want real connections with staff who are well-trained to educate and inform across all channels. Over 73% of customers reported in InMoment’s survey that staff interaction is key when creating positive experiences – and a further 61% said poor staff attitude, lack of knowledge and slow or unhelpful service contributed to a negative memorable experience. Brands should look for ways to reduce customer pain points, increase frequency of opportunities to delight, and measure the change, and this must happen wherever a customer interacts with a brand.

One of the key opportunities for brands is to implement always-on listening, plugging in CX feedback technology into all channels to ensure customer feedback is being consistently collected, analysed and acted upon. AI will be key, opening up barriers to communication and empowering CX professionals by arming them with relevant and timely data. Brands that embrace this technology, listen to customers consistently and – most importantly – make operational changes based on this data will keep the 24/7 customer on side.

Despite apocalyptic talk that artificial intelligence will replace people at some time in the not-too-distant future, InMoment’s annual US CX Trends report revealed that the human factor continues to be the primary force in making or breaking the customer experience. Consumers value genuine connections with staff who are well-trained to care, educate and inform, whether in-store, online, or on the phone.

More than six out of ten (65%) of US consumers report that “staff interaction” highly influenced their decision to buy more products from a brand, while another 65% reported that access to educators and experts is highly influential.

In researching factors that contributed to positive, memorable experiences, we found good alignment between what consumers prioritize and what brands felt was most important to their customers. Consumers’ top 5 contributors to positive experiences were staff interaction, access to experts/educators, loyalty treated differently, trial / testing options, and exclusive products/services. Similarly, brands ranked their top five as staff interaction, loyalty treated differently, customization options, exclusive products/services, and access to experts/educators.

While human interaction is key to positive experiences, it’s also the top factor in poor experiences. And while brands recognize this fact, they significantly underestimate the real damage employees can do to the relationship with customers—and to the bottom line.

Almost three-fourths (74%) of consumers report that poor staff interactions (due to negative attitudes, lack of knowledge, or other reasons) were the key contributor to the type of bad experiences that they remember. By comparison, only 29% of brands reported the same.  This shopping 45% gap in understanding was the biggest disconnect in the study.

With human interactions so clearly influential in customer relationships, brands must ensure that employees who work directly with customers can make the kind of emotional connection that reinforces positive, memorable experiences. While this can be challenging, especially in industries with high, front-line turnover rates, the stakes are too high to ignore.

So what else should brands so to ensure positive experience? In addition to their own staff, brands can leverage outside experts to boost the experience. We’ve seen this work well for brands that partner with both professional “experts” and respected peer voices—particularly on social platforms. With more customers than ever crowdsourcing their buying decisions, it makes sense to invest in authentic relationships with others who can speak on your brand’s behalf.

Outside of human interaction, nothing makes an experience more memorable than ensuring your customers feel special. Loyalty perks were mentioned in the top five positive experience influencers for both brands and consumers, so leveraging a loyalty program can be a major differentiator. However, our research also indicated that not all perks are equal. It’s important to do the proper work of understanding what benefits truly deliver value that enhances the relationship. Finally, consumers also value the ability to try new products and services before they purchase. This makes an impact because it both allows them to feel special, and demonstrates a measure of trust.

In a world so focused on technology, it can be easy to underestimate the impact of human interaction. Given these findings, however, it’s clear that if brands should invest in hiring, training, and technology that supports their human talent delivering the most positive, memorable experiences possible.

To learn more about the latest findings in customer experience, download our 2018 CX Trends Report!

In my last post, I discussed findings from InMoment’s 2018 CX Trends Report. In this annual study, we explore brand/consumer perspectives on various areas of the customer experience, which allows us to identify where there is alignment as well as disconnects in perception and expectations.

One area where we saw a significant disconnect was around personalization efforts and the requisite need brands have to mine and hoard their customers’ personal details and preferences. While brands brazenly claim they’re asking for these private bits “in an effort to improve the customer experience,” consumers aren’t so sure they’re benefiting from the exchange. In this year’s study we asked consumers and brands to tell us whether these efforts made them feel “cared for” as brands claim, or whether the result instead makes them feel “creepy.”  We put a slight twist on the questions to brands, asking on which end of the spectrum they feel their own actions lie, and the answers were fascinating.

A whopping 75% of consumers find most forms of personalization to be at least somewhat creepy, and 25% found these efforts to be very creepy. Surprisingly, 40% of brands admitted that some of their efforts were creepy, with 10% admitting they are very creepy. Kind of scary.

So what are some examples of “creepy” personalization efforts? Well, you don’t need to rely on second-hand interpretations because true to InMoment’s passion for providing forums where customers can have real conversations about their experiences, we asked several open-ended questions to understand what creepy sounds like in their words:    

• “[The experience] was intrusive and too personal, and also presumptive about me and my wants and likes.
• “I didn’t like being emailed about a product I had left in a cart on a website, or emailed about products I have recently searched. Also, I do not like targeted ads on websites. It feels like I’m being stalked.”
• “[The brand] wanted me to enable/install the app to get a great in-store experience, but of course it ALSO asked for permissions to [access] my contacts, location, emails, etc. NO WAY.”
• “I had an ex-boyfriend that lived beside a restaurant. I would sometimes take pictures of his cat. Google would immediately suggest that I upload those pictures to Google and review my experience at that restaurant.”

These comments helped us understand two things. First, consumers are keen to the exchange inequity. And second, the biggest violation occurs when there’s a crossover between the physical and digital worlds, like when they think Facebook or Instagram are listening to and then benefiting (a la targeted marketing) to their conversations.

Customers are creeped out and brands know they’re being creepy. So what? As luck would have it, our study went one step further and asked consumers not just how they felt about personalization attempts, but also what action they took when they veer into creepy. The results: 20% will leave, 22% will begin looking for another brand to serve their needs, and 31% of consumers will trash talk a brand after a creepy experience. So while the initial sting of the loss of business may not feel too painful, the compounding damage to a brand’s reputation may result in a compounding effect — kind of like throwing a stone into a pond. The damage continues to echo.    

At the end of the day, you want to build a relationship with your customers, not creep them out. The balance is tricky, but understanding what your customers truly value — what elements transform a creepy experience into one of real value — is worth the effort.  

To learn more, download the full 2018 CX Trends Report!

Companies say converting more leads to customers will be their top priority over the next year, according to recent research. This is certainly a worthy goal, but it begs a natural next question — how do you keep customers once you have them?

This conundrum is one retailers have been trying to solve for decades. Thanks to new technologies, that’s becoming easier to do in 2017. Recently, Walmart announced a plan to bring Minority Report-style facial recognition technology from the big screen to retail stores to identify and intervene with unhappy customers at scale.

Where Facial Recognition Technology Provides the Most Value

Walmart may not have been top-of-mind when it comes to innovation in the past, but a number of significant tech innovation pushes this past year demonstrate that this legacy brick-and-mortar behemoth is committed to evolving with, and perhaps leading significant change.

Walmart’s stated goal in implementing facial recognition is to understand customer sentiment in real time so staff can provide support to alleviate situations that could damage a customer’s experience around a single transaction, as well as their longer-term loyalty.

But the potential benefits are much broader than simple triage. Here are three scenarios where facial recognition technology can earn retailers greater customer feedback in-store, as well as what retailers can do to productively implement that information.

Understanding the Journey

With facial recognition technology, retailers can examine touch points and flow on the journey purchase and determine how each is impacting the customer experience, including spend, whether positive or negative.

In-store shoppers have many interactions that collectively determine their overall experience. That’s why retailers must work to understand if every single touch point — interactions with sales associates, products, environment, technologies etc. — is working well, and what can be improved if it’s not.

For instance, if shoppers typically leave a retailer’s “Health and Beauty” section more frustrated than when they entered, this indicates issues with experiences specific to that department. Granular insights like these will help retailers make small improvements across their overall in-store customer experiences. Armed with this understanding, human workers can be trained to provide specific types of assistance at various touch points to improve or enrich that specific experience.

Personalizing the Experience

Facial recognition by itself has interesting and helpful applications. However, the real promise lies in using this data in concert with other data sources and analytics technologies to gain a comprehensive understanding of individual customers.

One of the most talked-about buzzwords of the last 18 months has been personalization. And while application of this concept has been used primarily by digital marketers to target offers and content, a study earlier this year confirmed that consumers value personalization during purchase and service interactions above marketing/advertising moments, which they ranked least important of the three.

A future scenario might be leveraging facial recognition to understand when a customer had entered a store, and then harnessing the plethora of other customer and contextual information to serve up a personalized and very meaningful experience, based on past interactions and nimble enough to read and analyze in-store behaviors and sentiment. This stream of real-time “customer experience intelligence” could power everything from targeted offers based on same-day comparison shopping from a customer’s mobile device, to individual customer dossiers to support more helpful associate-to-customer interactions.

Imagine a store manager receiving an alert that a VIP customer had entered the store, a record of her recent browsing history of both your website and your competitors’, her recent purchases, as well as social reviews and feedback she’s given about your brand — along with past and current sentiment. Instead of extending a generic greeting, the technology would augment the floor staff’s expertise to create a very different customer experience, indeed.

Anticipating their Needs

The ultimate promise of today’s emerging technologies and analytics are moving beyond responding to, and instead anticipating, customers’ needs, wants and opportunities for delight. With enough data and time, predictive algorithms can find patterns in past behaviors, and make an educated guess at what customers, and metrics, will do in the future. This allows retailers to avoid drastically bad experiences by preventing the conditions that cause them in the first place. It also allows brands to identify elements of the experience that drive the most positive business and relationship outcomes, and proactively build those into more places along the customer journey.

One national brand we worked with brought together individual store sales data and goals, with customer feedback and sentiment. We ran predictive models that identified which locations would miss sales goals, and exactly why — by location. Armed with this information, each store manager could focus their team on bolstering the experience in ways that both make customers happier, and get them to their monthly sales goals.

In the past, predictive models were run almost exclusively on structured data, and netted a respectable, but still wanting 60% to 70% accuracy rate. By incorporating unstructured human data from facial recognition software, social reviews and survey comments, accuracy can reach well into the 90% range.

Just like any new technology, facial recognition won’t be a silver bullet for understanding and interacting with today’s born-digital customers. However, applied thoughtfully, and in concert with a broader set of data and technologies, facial recognition is set to become a very powerful lens into one of the most elusive and important questions standing between buyers and sellers: Why. Why do they love this and shun that? Why didn’t they purchase? Why did they choose our competitor over our brand? Why do they come back over and over again? Why did they spend more this time than last? Every tool retailers can bring to the solving of this mystery is priceless.

CX programmes are adopted by many organisations across the globe, each with a different approach and ultimate goal. Whilst the concept of CX is namely the same wherever you look, we’re really interested to see and share how it’s interpreted across different countries.

In our CX Trends Study we compared customer experiences in the UK and Germany, two major European economies. We delved into what emotions consumers and brands associate with positive and negative experiences, loyalty and personalisation.

We found that emotion plays a huge part when it comes to CX. As customers, we base our experiences on whether something makes us happy, sad or even indifferent. What emotions do we feel when we have a positive experience? Do we feel satisfied, important or reassured? Our survey identified that 35% of consumers in the UK felt safe and reassured when they had a positive experience in comparison to 40% in Germany.

Whilst it makes sense to feel reassured when we are happy with something, we saw a higher percentage of Germans (13%) who felt excitement when they had a positive experience, with an underwhelming 2.5% of UK consumers experiencing the same emotion. The question is, why is there such a stark difference in this particular emotion? Do Germans express more emotion than Brits? Do they have different values in the exchange process which means their expectations might be lower than neighbouring countries? Or are British people simply harder to please?

Our study also showed that over 20% of British consumers surveyed ranked reassurance as one of their top emotions associated with loyalty to a brand. In comparison, this halves in Germany to 10%. That said, enjoyment and excitement remain significantly higher in Germany than in the UK.

Looking at negative experiences, the differences between UK and German consumers were similarly as stark. When asked what emotions they most associate with something negative, 34% of German consumers said anger was their primary emotion, in comparison with 8% of Brits. In addition, open-ended comments such as “burning anger and hatred” were received by consumers in Germany — some of the most emotive comments submitted in the report.

The CX Trends Study provided lots of rich and valuable statistics from across several different countries helping us to understand the true emotions of our consumers. In a world where expectations are constantly changing, it’s vital that brands stay in tune with their customers’ ever evolving emotions. From this, we can start to understand and learn that some consumers are more emotive in their reactions and develop their CX approach appropriately.

No two customers are the same which is why different CX programmes must cater for all, wherever they are globally. Without this guidance, brands and customers really will be ‘worlds apart’. We’d love to hear your views — have you encountered these differences? Have you been surprised by the nuances in global customer expectations?

We’ll be exploring these differences and more in our next CX Trends study, which will be published early 2018.

In today’s connected world, managing a customer’s expectation and consistently creating positive experiences has proven to be a challenge for many organisations.

Part of the challenges in customer experience can be attributed to a variance in preferences across different industries and geographies. A recent study conducted by the UK Institute of Customer Service (UKCI) revealed that customer needs for specific types of services vary by industry, country, and channel.

Importance of understanding customer differences across sectors

In the modern business context, a healthy customer experience initiative is defined by a brand’s commitment to both satisfying customers and motivating strong loyalty. This in turn requires a firm to have a strong understanding of wide-ranging customer expectations.

Today, customers expect excellent experiences from their bank, insurance provider, mobile operator, and even their electricity supplier. However, priorities and expectations of what is considered excellent vary across industries.

For instance, staff competencies are considered particularly important in the banking and insurance industries while speed of resolving complaints, product reliability, and accessibility is a top priority in retail.

However, amidst these varying expectations, there is one shared ideology that prevails — there is no business without customers. Understanding customer expectations is therefore a prerequisite to delivering a superior service which can in turn create brand advocates and prolonged customer loyalty.

In fact, a study by Wunderman found that a staggering 79 percent of customers base their initial purchase intent on how efficiently a brand understands and cares about them. Suffice to say, understanding customer expectations is a crucial ingredient to the success or failure of a business.

Different customer expectations across countries

It is imperative that customer service representatives are aware of the diverse requirements in different countries and cultures. It is especially vital for companies that wish to expand their operations globally. Understanding disparities in customer priorities will invariably help companies identify strengths and opportunities for improvement and differentiation.

These priorities can vary from price, quality, and physical presence of a representative. For instance, customers in Japan have very high expectations of customer service and do not expect to pay for it. Accordingly, service providers in Japanese markets are expected to go out of their way to serve customers and solve problems.

If a customer seeks out phone support in Japan and is dissatisfied with the outcome, the company will more often than not send someone to help them out. This may not always be expected from companies in countries like the UK or US.

Furthermore, a 2014 Global Customer Service Barometer Report by American Express revealed that 78 percent of US customers rate being connected to someone who is knowledgeable as important, whilst only 65 percent of customers in the UK agreed with this. Moreover, a study conducted by New Voice Media found only 25 percent of Americans will hold while on the phone after 10 minutes, compared to 64 percent of Brits, for whom it is a regular occurrence.

Understanding wavering emotions

Existing UKCSI research notes considerable differences in how customers describe emotions associated with positive experiences. The research showed Danish customers, for example, predominantly using the verbatim “they had what I was looking for” while Spanish customers usually stated “I am satisfied with doing what I came to do.”

Respondents were further analysed to understand which emotions they associate with brands to which they feel the most loyal. Most customers across the countries analysed rated “satisfaction” as the most common emotion they associate with brand loyalty.

Around 20 percent of UK customers associated being safe and reassured with brand loyalty, while only 17 percent of US customers agreed with this. “Entertained” was the lowest-ranked emotion overall. However, 11 percent of Finnish customers chose this emotion — nearly twice as many as the nearest customer group from another region. Meanwhile, customers in France and Finland ranked ‘excited’ higher than in other countries.

The research also suggests customers across Europe share many of the same priorities but there are also a number of nuanced priorities by each country. Differences in the way customers score each priority out of ten was also noted. For example, there is less than an average differentiation in the range of priority scores in Poland, with less than one point difference between the highest rated priority (condition of delivered goods)  and the lowest (organisation contributes to the national economy).

Communicating using the right channels

Most companies today use multiple channels to interact with customers. This has been made easier with the rapid increase in technology and the advent of social media. However, customers across different industries and countries have varied preferences on how they wish to communicate with service professionals.

For instance, banking customers prefer a complete omni-channel experience with physical branches, online banking, mobile apps, text notifications, and phone calls. However, customer expectations with a healthcare company may not go beyond the ability to contact the company via phone and receive a text with reminders of upcoming appointments.

In the UK, UKCSI research revealed that website use is higher than the European average, although this is not uniformly the case across sectors. Website use is particularly high in telecommunications, media, insurance, and utilities, but is slightly less than average for banking, retail (food), and transport. In the Netherlands, “in person” is used less than the European average, although it is still the most popular channel for interacting with organisations.

Acknowledging preferred personalisation levels

In recent years, personalisation strategies have grown in importance and have seen a significant impact on levels of advocacy and loyalty customers have towards a brand. In fact, customers today do not just expect but demand tailored services that suit personal preferences.

They also want e-commerce sites and in-person sales associates to know who they are and offer relevant assistance. UKCSI’s recent survey recognised this fact, as “personalised support” emerged as a prime priority over purchase and advertising.

The report further indicated that customers in North America and the UK chose personalised support even more often than average at 54 percent and 53 percent, respectively. Moreover, 41 percent of customers in Spain value personalisation during the purchase process highest of all countries, a full six points above the average of 35 percent, while German customers weighted the different types of personalisation most equally.

It is imperative that companies today understand and respond to not just a customer’s buying habits and incomes, but also their emotions and states of mind. Acknowledging these subjective experiences and the role every function plays in shaping them is undoubtedly important in ensuring that customer satisfaction is more than just a slogan but also an attainable goal.

Walmart is the latest retailer testing facial recognition technology in an effort to create a better customer experience. Customer experience (CX) expert Brennan Wilkie says that facial recognition will be a key technology moving forward in the personalization of shopping.

“Installing facial recognition monitors in stores has the potential to grant retailers insight into the in-store customer experience,” Wilkie, the senior vice president of customer experience strategy at InMoment, told FierceRetail. “They can use it to determine, for example, whether customers are frustrated during self check-out and notify staff to respond with triage, pre-empting complaints and ultimately attrition.”

Retailers can then pair the facial expression data with customer demographics, loyalty metrics and other product purchase information, a brand can gain a deep understanding of the consumer.

“This intelligence could fuel action across the organization, from targeting demographics differently, to increasing access to self check-out, to deploying human talent at the specific points along the customer journey where they increase value,” he added.

However, Wilkie warns that Walmart and other retailers will need to be cautious as they test and implement these new tools in order to avoid crossing the line of customer privacy with this new tool. To address this, brands must be transparent about where, when and why they’re using this new technology, and of course, offer value in return for this privacy invasion.

There are several other challenges associated with using facial recognition. For example introducing new data when companies are already swimming in Big Data and struggling to derive value from it.

“Having a strong strategy for how to manage, access, analyze and action the information will is paramount,” Wilkie said. “Practically, there may be pushback from customers who are uncomfortable with the idea of their in-store actions being not only recorded by facial recognition monitors (often already done for security purposes), but observed and analyzed for business strategy reasons. If retailers can communicate the overall benefits of the technology as they roll it out, any negative feedback should be outweighed by the positive. This strategy has worked well with newly introduced in-store technology, such as self-checkout lines and chip readers, in the past.”

Another concern related to this infant technology is that there is the potential for the data to be misread. Therefore, the analytics software needs to be very sophisticated to be able to get results off of reading a customer’s expression.

The final challenge will be knowing when a retailer should implement new changes based on localized behaviors.

“Regionally, customer demographic preferences can differ. This should be considered as CX changes are implemented at scale as a result of learned insights from the technology,” he said.

So which retailers should be leading the way with facial recognition?

Wilkie recommends retailers with Millennials as their main demographic since study findings show that Millennials are most comfortable with the idea of sharing personal data with companies as a means to using their products or services. Additionally, retailers who are testing out the incorporation of robot assistance for processes such as self-checkout and self-price check are great candidates for using facial recognition.

“By better understanding a customer’s reactions at every point in their customer journey, retailers can assess the ideal balance of human and tech at each customer touchpoint. They may find that their demographic of customers prefers the traditional experience, unlike other retailers with more connected consumers as customers,” Wilkie said.

Using facial recognition technology for CX insights is still in its early stages. Advancements in software will add a new layer of understanding of the CX for retailers.

“Written feedback, voice feedback and body language will be the holy trinity to delivering a robust customer experience once facial recognition technology is mastered,” he added.

The way most companies use Voice of Customer (VoC) data today is leaving opportunity the table.

Generally, VoC data is used behind the scenes to identify problems, plug holes, and get a general sense of how associates or agents are performing at one particular touchpoint.

While there is value in this approach, it remains highly reactive, and limited. It only provides brief glimpses into the customer experience—a snapshot of a single moment in time. It is looking at individual interactions rather than the entire journey.

The data tends to be siloed and used only by the team that collects it. Doing this means those valuable insights can be used to improve that touchpoint, but misses the opportunity to create a better end-to-end experience for the customer.

A more strategic approach: Using VoC—both the process of listening, and applying the resulting insight—continuously at every touchpoint along the customer journey.

By shifting your perspective from surveying customers, to being engaged in a continuous conversation, you will open a wealth of new opportunities for both operational improvements and more profitable relationships.

Transforming Customer Experiences with VoC Data

VoC insights are one of the most important tools for developing a personalized and memorable customer experience. Customer expectations continually evolve and when done right, VoC intelligence can help ensure the customer experience continues to align with those expectations.

A recent Forrester report—How to Build the Right CX Strategy—highlights just how important customer insights are in designing effective customer experiences. In particular, these insights serve as a basis for developing the right CX strategy. VoC can be used to understand the following:

• Customers’ Emotional Needs: What are your customers’ pain points? Are there unmet expectations? Do these expectations differ across personas? VoC data is a powerful tool because it makes something seemingly intangible, such as assessing emotional connections, possible. And considering that how customers feel when interacting with a brand is a significant driver of loyalty, it’s absolutely critical to understand customers’ emotional needs and execute a strategy to deliver a more personalized, engaging experience.
• CX Expectations: What touchpoints are the most important in your customers’ journey? Leveraging VoC feedback across the entire journey will enable brands to understand customers’ expectations and prioritize the touchpoints that have the greatest impact on loyalty. Also, focusing on open-end narrative feedback will create a deeper understanding of expectations and allow you to uncover insights you can’t get when focusing on scores. These expectations evolve quickly in today’s marketplace. By eliciting and examining customer feedback continuously, you’ll ensure you are delivering on these evolving needs.
• Drivers of Loyalty: Today’s VoC analysis tools empower businesses to learn more from feedback. For example, you can identify specific touchpoints that have a large impact on loyalty and are likely to either create promoters or detractors. Focusing on these “moments of truth” and ensuring you exceed customer expectations will drive customer loyalty and create brand advocates. As customer feedback pours in from these important touchpoints you can deploy resources to fix issues and recover customers.

What a Continuous Approach Looks Like

VoC intelligence powers how a brand shapes and refines the customer experience. You can ensure you’re aligning with customer expectations. And when you’re constantly monitoring these expectations and emotional needs, your CX will become more dynamic and adaptable.

A continuous approach requires VoC data to be plugged into the entire customer journey. So beyond merely just researching and designing CX opportunities, you can use customer feedback for:

• Discovering Opportunities: Rich customer feedback data can reveal what your customers want and where opportunities exist. New products, new features, or servicing options can all be discovered through effective analysis of customer feedback when listening across the entire journey.
• Identifying Solutions to Problems: You know the types of feedback detractors are sharing. This information can help you in the moment to isolate problems and provide quick solutions. For example, let’s say in Region A, you see a spiking number of customers are having trouble getting answers to a particular product issue. You can use this insight in real time to optimize your workforce and deploy targeted training to address customer concerns.
• Relationship Monitoring: VoC data can also help us nurture relationships at the individual customer level. You can use it to check in with customers throughout the customer lifecycle and determine how you’re delivering on their expectations over time.
• Identifying Differentiators: One of the most profound insights you can discover by listening to customers are your differentiators. What makes you special? What makes you stand out? Many brands do this with no or very little customer input, which is a huge mistake. Customers are telling you. All it takes is the willingness to listen.

Bottom Line: A Strategic Approach to VoC Data Starts with a Mindset

Looking at VoC data differently can help you glean more strategic value from customer insights. The data and the tools are at your fingertips. The key, though, is mindset. A reactive-only approach leaves opportunity on the table. Instead, we should approach VoC data with a mindset that customer insights are a source of intelligence for the entire enterprise.

Your customers are your best partners. And that means they must have a permanent seat at the table. Their voices should be heard. Every day. Across all areas of your business.

If your organization isn’t currently taking this approach, take the first step. Look at what customers are telling you, and connect that intelligence to one new initiative or area of your business. Share those insights, and you’re on your way to a more strategic and vastly more beneficial way of bringing the voice of your customers into your business.